Quotes

What is needed for a sound expansion of production is additional capital goods, not money or fiduciary media. The credit expansion is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.~Ludwig von Mises

The concept of a general equilibrium has no relevance to the real world (in other words, classical economics is an exercise in futility).~George Soros

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.~Arthur Schopenhauer

It is not the cost of returning to gold circulation that is astronomical, but the cost of not returning.~Antal E. Fekete

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.~Ludwig von Mises

Gold is the money of Kings, Silver is the money of gentlemen, Barter is the money of peasants, but Debt is the money of slaves.~Norm Franz

Investing is about having people agree with you… later.~Jim Grant

Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws.~Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild

Governments have recognised that gold is the only obstacle to erecting a tower of Babel of irredeemable debt.~Ferdinand Lips

The biggest bubble out there is central bank credibility. If Draghi was a stock he'd be on a P/E of 200! Yellen's on 100. When that bubble pops, all hell will break loose again, and there you really just want to be in cash.~Gerard Minack

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.~Mahatma Gandhi

Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants – but debt is the money of slaves.~Norm Franz

Money is gold, and nothing else.~J P Morgan

The Fed can change how things look. But not what they are.~Jim Grant

No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquillity and contentment...and the highest record of years of prosperity. In the foreign field there is peace, the goodwill which comes from mutual understanding.~US President Calvin Coolidge December 4, 1928

If you don’t own gold, you know neither history nor economics.~Ray Dalio

I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism... I have every confidence that there will be a revival of activity in the spring, and that during this coming year the country will make steady progress.~Andrew W. Mellon, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury December 31, 1929

How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.~Adolf Hitler

The US and China, the world’s two main economic powers, have locked horns over establishing a major development bank that could rival the twin Bretton Woods institutions – and Beijing has emerged, for the first time, as the clear winner.~David Marsh, OMFIF

Central banks gold market manipulation is an example of action in a complex system that can cause the system to reach the critical state. . . . That central banks intervene in the gold market is neither new, nor surprising. To the extent that gold is money, and central banks control money, then central banks must control gold."~Jim RickardsSource: The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the World Monetary System.

Credit expansion is the governments’ foremost tool in their struggle against the market economy. In their hands it is the magic wand designed to conjure away the scarcity of capital goods, to lower the rate of interest or to abolish it altogether, to finance lavish government spending, to expropriate the capitalists, to contrive everlasting booms, and to make everybody prosperous.~Ludwig von Mises

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.~Ludwig von Mises

Remember what we're looking at. Gold is a currency. It is still, by all evidence, a premier currency, that no fiat currency, including the dollar, can match.~Alan Greenspan, October 2014

The idea that when people see prices falling they will stop buying those cheaper goods or cheaper food does not make much sense. And aiming for 2 percent inflation every year means that after a decade prices are more than 25 percent higher and the price level doubles every generation. That is not price stability, yet they call it price stability. I just do not understand central banks wanting a little inflation.~Paul Volcker

Of course, this bubble is really a bubble of faith, and its main derivative is faith-based currency. And it’s global. Bubbles take time to burst roughly proportional to their size, and these nested bubbles the Fed and other central banks have engineered are by far the largest ever in human history.~Chris Martenson

Janet Yellen at the FED is equivalent to having a biology schoolteacher who has never seen blood perform brain surgery.~Nassim Taleb

Americans are getting stronger. Twenty years ago, it took two people to carry ten dollars worth of groceries. Today, a five-year-old can do it.~Henny Youngman

There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash.~Irving Fisher, leading U.S. economist, New York Times, Sept. 5, 1929

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.~Bob Wells

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system. For if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.~Henry Ford

A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a lunatic.~Dresden James

Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump. The boom squanders through mal-investment scarce factors of production and reduces the stock available through overconsumption; its alleged blessings are paid for by impoverishment.~Ludwig von Mises

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.~George Bernard Shaw

Americans are getting stronger. Twenty years ago, it took two people to carry ten dollars worth of groceries. Today, a five-year-old can do it.~Henny Youngman

The Fed’s balance sheet is a pile of tinder, but it hasn’t been lit … inflation will eventually have to rise.~Alan Greenspan 25 October 2014Source: New Orleans Investment Conference.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.~Vladimir Lenin

Once in a while, you will stumble upon the truth. But most of us manage to pick ourselves up, and hurry along as if nothing had happened.~Sir Winston Churchill

One day the day will come when every citizen must learn that he has to pay for the debt which the government is taking on and declares as being for the "welfare of the people".~Ludwig Erhart

Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body - the producers and consumers themselves.~Herbert Hoover

What the government spends more, the public spends less. Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens.~Ludwig von Mises

Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.~Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild

REAL economics is the science of money.~Phil Scott

This crash is not going to have much effect on business.~Arthur Reynolds, Chairman of Continental Illinois Bank of Chicago, October 24, 1929

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought. But World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.~Albert Einstein

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.~John Kenneth Galbraith

Since the beginning of recorded history, the business of government has been wealth confiscation.~Ron Holland

There will be no interruption of our permanent prosperity.~Myron E. Forbes, President, Pierce Arrow Motor Car Co., January 12, 1928

History shows that once an enormous debt has been incurred by a nation, there are only two ways to solve it: one is simply to declare bankruptcy – repudiate the debt. The other is to inflate the currency and thus to destroy the wealth of the ordinary citizen.~Adam Smith

At present, up to 12 trillion yuan stays in domestic residents' saving accounts. The launch of individual gold investment, therefore, will allow residents to change currency assets into gold assets. At the macro level, it will expand channels for changing savings into investment, thus adjusting the money supply; in the micro aspect, allowing citizens to trade and keep gold can improve social welfare, benefiting both the country and the population. Moreover, with the dual attributes of common commodity and currency commodity, gold is a desirable instrument for hedging. Therefore, developing gold trade for individuals is practical.~Zhou Xiaochuan, Governor, the People's Bank of China

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.~Ludwig von Mises

When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.~Warren Buffett

100 years ago, the dollar was worth 1555mg of gold. Today, it is worth about 26mg. The long-term price target is 0.~Dr. Keith Weiner

The successful remonetisation of gold by a major power such as Russia would draw attention to the fault-lines between fiat currencies issued by governments unable or unwilling to do the same and those that can follow in due course. It would be a schism in the world's dollar-based monetary order.~Alasdair MacleodSource: Goldmoney.com

Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.~Ayn Rand

There is no doubt that the AIIB is a direct challenge to the World Bank, just as the new ‘BRICS bank' takes aim at the International Monetary Fund. The two China-led bodies are intended to break Western control over global finance through the Bretton Woods institutions.~Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency - first by inflation, then by deflation - the banks … will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered….
The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people - to whom it properly belongs.~Thomas Jefferson in the debate over the Re-charter of the Bank Bill (1809)

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.~John Maynard Keynes

Once common principles for their circulation-credit policy are agreed to by the different credit-issuing banks, or once the multiplicity of credit issuing banks is replaced by a single World Bank, there will no longer be any limit to the issue of fiduciary media.~Ludwig von Mises 1912

Our monetary system is lurching from crisis to crisis, on its way to collapse. Debt is growing out of control, rising at an exponential rate... The problem is that the dollar is irredeemable. It’s an IOU. An IOU cannot extinguish a debt, only shift it. The interest can’t be paid off either, so it accumulates. Every year, the debt grows by at least the accrued interest.~Keith Weiner

Economics departments are dominated by Marxism, which is taken straight or on the rocks, in the form of Keynesianism.~Ayn RandSource: Philosophy: Who Needs it?

Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months.~Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in economics, Oct. 17, 1929

The causes of all panics, crashes and depressions can be summed up in only four words: the misuse of credit.~Ludwig von Mises

We’ve got no money, so we’ve got to think.~Ernest Rutherford

... a serious depression seems improbable; [we expect] recovery of business next spring, with further improvement in the fall.~Harvard Economic Society, November 10, 1929

The few who understand the system will either be so interested from its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class.~The Rothschild brothers of London, writing to associates in New York, 1863

It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.~Ron Paul

Every dollar printed is a government tax on cash balances.~Frank Hollenbeck

The end of the decline of the Stock Market will probably not be long, only a few more days at most.~Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics at Yale University, November 14, 1929

Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.~Malcom Forbes

Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.~J. Paul Getty

Every dollar printed is a government tax on cash balances.~Frank Hollenbeck